YouTube Testing Post-Roll Ads

YouTube has begun experimenting with a different angle on post-roll adverts. As we posted a while back, videos that have adverts enabled currently have optional overlay videos that would pause the clip you are watching and play an advert video before taking you back to the place where you left off – a feature that was only kicked in if a user clicked a button to play the promotional video.

The difference now is that at the end of the clip, regardless of choice, a video clip related to the optional overlays will play automatically. I first read about this on Epicenter on the Wired blog network who had this to say;

This may seem to contradict Google’s justification of overlay ads earlier this summer when they said that 75 percent of their viewers were dissatisfied with pre- and post-roll ads, but it looks more like a simple way to get a few eyeballs at otherwise ignored content. The new ads still only run on a small portion of videos, and even if the drop off rate is high, if a few people hang on to watch the previously promo’d ad at the end, it’s still more viewers than would have seen the ads otherwise.